A lot of it was determining what made me happy versus what made other people happy. Other people may want you to live life a certain way, and it's easy to convince yourself that they must be right. A large part of it was simply allowing myself to be into topics and things and ways of living that other people just don't understand.
Take hacking for instance. Most hard core programmers simply love fiddling with computers and making them do cool stuff. You might have a personal project to write your own OS or C compiler. Now lets say you hang around some other programmers who are very good at their jobs, but in the end it's just that: a job. They might say "sounds interesting but why are you wasting your time on that? You program all day for work, I don't understand why you go home and do it again for something that will never make you any money. You really ought to have a more balanced life. Hey, come hang out with us and have some beers and watch the game."
And so you do, which is great and it is nice to get out once in a while and do normal social things. But what happens if you let your well-intentioned friends convince you that these hobby projects really aren't worthy of your time? In the beginning you might buy into it. But over time as you start to accomodate more and more to the life other people envision for you, you start to feel a growing emptiness inside. A lot of people fill that emptiness with quick fixes. Things like houses and expensive "stuff" were the big thing for me (and cigarettes, but no more thank goodness).
Eventually (hopefully) you figure out that the only person who really has to live with yourself every day is YOU. So barring doing something completely selfish that destroys the people who depend on you, it's best to live the life the way you naturally desire to live it. I'm not making a hedonistic argument here, just saying that if you really want nothing more than to go home at the end of a hard day and fiddle with x86 TSS structures to get your homegrown OS to boot, it's not really anyone else's business. It's also not your problem if they don't like it, think it's too geeky, or think you should be doing something with your personal time other than "fooling around with computers".
So a big part of my psychological and intellectual breathing room was giving myself permission to be who I am. Not everyone is going to understand my decision to pack up my crap in an RV and travel around the country for who knows how long. In the past I might have said "maybe they're right, this is a little crazy, why can't I just settle down?" But now I give myself permission to say "I'm doing this; I hope you'll support me. If you don't, I understand, but I'm doing this anyway."
In a lot of ways, my conception of breathing room mirrors that of the Gestalt prayer, something I learned about only today:
"I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped."
(Fritz Perls, "Gestalt Therapy Verbatim", 1969)